


A Thousand Lives

by thorkified



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Death, Emotional Hurt, Grief, M/M, Memories, Mourning, Past Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-22
Updated: 2017-12-22
Packaged: 2019-02-18 10:16:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13097973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thorkified/pseuds/thorkified
Summary: After Lucifer's death, Sam's inner turmoil won't let him rest, so he tries to distract himself by cleaning his room. Under how bed, however, he finds a book he has never seen before and curiosity gets the better of him when he sits down and opens it. He doesn't know what to expect, but what he finds makes his grief only worse and he can't do anything about it.





	A Thousand Lives

Sam didn’t know what he had discovered when he turned the mattress of his bed in the bunker over and revealed the thick, leather bound book that was hidden under the head of the bed. His first reaction was confusion, which quickly turned into curiosity when he picked it off the floor and blew the dust off the cover. It must have been there for quite some time already, but where did it come from?

Sam forgot that he was about to clean up his room from one corner to the other and sat down on the bed, his mattress not even in the right place again yet, and looked at the book in his hands. Somehow he wanted to open it, on the other hand he was cautious because it could be dangerous - it wouldn’t be the first thing they randomly found in the bunker that turned out to cause trouble. And still, something about this book was… familiar. As if it had waited for him for however long it was down there.

For a while, Sam simply sat there and looked at the book. Sometimes he brushed over the leather cover and amount the engraved word ‘Memories’, wondering how long it had been there and why he had only found it now. It wasn’t a good time for him to begin with, he had only started to deep clean his room to somehow distract himself from the thoughts that came back whether he wanted them to or not. After they had lost Lucifer - though it wasn’t so much a loss for anyone but him, but he never expected any less - Sam had been stuck in a constant state of misery. And this time, no matter how much he hated to admit it, he was in this all alone. He could never talk to anyone else about this, because to the outside he had to pretend to be glad about the outcome of this awful dimensional disaster. Inside, however, it was eating him alive and he didn’t know how to stop it.

Eventually, knowing that he would do this anyway, Sam sighed and opened the book. His curiosity was there, yes, but the craving for something else but this inner agony was stronger. At least until he read the words written in a very old and pretty handwriting on the first page.

_I always knew that I would lose you again,  
but at least I can keep you in my memories. _

Now, Sam was also a bit confused. He had expected some magic book or at least something else coming from their own library, but apparently this was a very personal book that someone had left here - for whatever reason. A little more curious now, Sam flipped the page to reveal the next one. There, he found a charcoal drawing on yellowed and wrinkled paper, indicating old age. Maybe sketch was the better word for it, as it was very simplistic and apparently done quick, but he noticed that the eyes were incredibly detailed. For some reason, Sam felt a knot in his stomach when he looked at those eyes and the shape of the face. Even the hair, though different, was kind of familiar to his eyes.

“Coincidence, that’s all,” he huffed nervously and flipped to the next page.

There it was again. Another sketch, this time with a different pen or coal, but it was obviously the same person. The face was slightly smaller, as if the person was younger, and the hair shorter, but Sam looked at the same eyes and the exact same person without a doubt. Now goosebumps accompanied the knot in his stomach.

“What the...” he mumbled and flipped through the following pages.

Every single one of them contained another drawing - all of the same person, sometimes laughing, sometimes with a neutral face, sometimes with slight differences like the nose or the mouth, but all of them were definitely the same person: Sam.

“Okay, this is getting creepy now.”

Sam swallowed the lump in his throat and looked at the next page, which was surprisingly empty. Frowning, he continued, only to be met with a photograph of himself. Not just any photograph though, it was visibly old and in black and white, corny and stiff looking but again, it was definitely Sam on it. He looked into the camera with a slight smirk, wearing expensive clothes and sitting in a huge chair, a cane in his hands and a hat next to him on the armrest.

Something about this felt eerie and Sam paused for a moment, still staring at the picture in front of him. How could this be possible? Why were there drawings and now apparently even photographs of him in this book and who had put them there? This all didn’t feel right and at the same time it made Sam sad looking at these images, even though he couldn’t explain why.

After the first photograph, Sam found many many more and each of them showed himself in a different setting, with different clothes and - surprisingly - mostly happy. Looking at these pictures of someone who definitely looked like him, but who jumped in age from what looked to be almost a child to a man his own age, was fascinating and scary at the same time. Those all couldn’t be from the same person, he realized that very quickly, because there were certain differences that just didn’t match up. Still, for some unknown reason, all of these boys and men looked like him.

When he stumbled over the first colored photograph, Sam’s heart skipped a few beats. There ‘he’ was again, barely sixteen or maybe seventeen - a young boy with rosy cheeks and a smile so wide that his happiness almost jumped out of the picture. And right next to him, giving the boy a proud and admiring look as he clung to his arm, was Lucifer. Sam shook his head and looked at the photo again, but he couldn’t deny that this was, indeed, Lucifer. He looked a little younger, not quite like Sam knew him but there was still a similarity. The same blue eyes, the same smile, even the hair was similar, even if it was combed back and a little lighter. Sam couldn’t believe it.

With a heavy weight on his chest, Sam turned the page again and faced a second picture, obviously from the same photoshoot. This time, the young boy had his head leaned against Lucifer’s shoulder and the blond pressed a kiss on his head with his eyes closed. The boy’s eyes were closed too and Sam swore he had never seen a face so full of bliss and content before. It physically hurt looking at this picture. A big part of him wanted to throw the book away and never touch it again, but at the same time he desperately wanted to know what else it contained.

After pressing his eyes shut for a minute and trying to calm down - with very little success - Sam kept going through the pictures. Now they were all colorful photographs, most of them showed a brunet boy or young man alone, but sometimes he wasn’t and every single time the same man was by his side - Lucifer. Unlike ‘Sam’, Lucifer never really changed apart from his hairstyle and clothes. The more photos Sam saw, the more he felt his heart drop in his chest and his mouth become dry.

There were elegant portraits of him and Lucifer, photos in front of houses or out in nature and eventually the pictures changed and Sam realized that all that came before those were professional photographs, now he was looking at personal pictures - ones that were taking in privacy. Before that, everything looked a little staged - apart from very few examples - and now it seemed all much more relaxed.

The first picture like this Sam came across was of ‘him’ again, wearing a long, black dressing gown. He was sitting in a window, a cigarette in his hands and looking outside onto a big city. His feet tangled above the ground and his face was dreamy and far away, but there was some kind of peace in the scenery that touched Sam’s heart. This picture wasn’t taken by someone who was paid to do it. It was taken by someone who deeply loved the young man in it and who found this random moment worth capturing. Sam kept looking at it until a wet drop suddenly hit the back of his hand. Only then he realized that his eyes had began to tear up and he quickly rubbed them dry again.

The next photo was from the same young man, this time sitting in a café and laughing about something. There were other people too, but Sam only had eyes for the man that looked like him. He wore something that looked like a dress, but Sam noticed that it must have been altered to just look different. It reminded him of dresses from the twenties, something that was only intensified by the hat on the table in front of him. All the other people were definitely women, all pretty and dressed up, but the fact that the young man was too surprised Sam.

When he saw the picture after that, he knew that his first instinct had been right. The young man was definitely wearing a dress because in this picture he was dancing with the same blond man he knew from previous photographs already and the skirt was flowing through the motion. Somehow it didn’t look weird at all though, because the brunet man looked very feminine and elegant and could pull those clothes off perfectly. If he wouldn’t have known he was a man, Sam would have probably been fooled by his general appearance.

The following photographs were all from him and Lucifer, going through their everyday life - drinking coffee, talking, one time even kissing. Sam felt a slight jealousy creep up in him when he looked at the happy couple, but he tried not to allow it to grow. This plan was blown away when he found the last picture of them though, or better, only of the young man. This one was definitely a private picture. ‘Sam’ laid on his back on top of a bearskin, the only thing covering his naked skin a piece of silk that was draped to just hide enough and yet reveal more than was needed to be ‘suggestive’. His legs were playfully in the air and the look of seduction in his eyes made the purpose of this photograph very clear. It took Sam a whole two minutes before he realized that this picture told more than just what it showed - he knew full well what happened after it was taken and this thought caused him to blush furiously and cover his mouth with a hand.

Sam knew he should stop, put the book away and forget he ever found it, but he simply couldn’t. These photos, these drawings… they were Lucifer’s, he knew it. He couldn’t imagine why this book was beneath his bed or why Lucifer put it there, but it was clear that this was his doing. If he had put it here, maybe he did it so Sam would find it? Or did he want to get it back one day and never show him? Or show it to Sam himself? He didn’t know and the questions kept pulling on his mind, but he couldn’t put the book down again, he simply couldn’t. He had to know what else was in there, even if every new picture hurt him more and more.

And there were many photos to come. Sam slowly watched the clothes change and witnessed the brunet man grow older, before he was inevitably replaced by a young boy again. It was a cycle it seemed and every time there were a few years worth of photographs following the first one of a new boy, before he was gone and another took his place. There was no way to misunderstand what was happening - the man died and Lucifer found the boy again, reborn into a new body. The realization that all of these men were Sam hit the hunter harder than anything else before.

Now he flipped through the pages almost frantically, tears running down his cheeks and dropping on the paper here and there - and everywhere he saw himself and Lucifer laughing and smiling and being happy, if only for a short time. There was so much love in these pictures, so much happiness and joy, that Sam felt awful when he realized that they had never had a minute alone where they had been happy. All the time it had been accusations and hatred and anger and rejection, again and again and again. Out of all these lives, the one he currently lived was probably the saddest and loneliest one. And Lucifer knew that too.

The last picture in the whole book was of himself, his actual self this time. It was the only picture of him in there and it was only a small one, taken during the time he was in Stanford. On the picture, Sam was on his way to class and looked at the sky, a peaceful image with the snow surrounding him and the smile on his face. Beneath it were words, written in the same handwriting as at the beginning of the book.

_I have promised to love you forever and always,_   
_through a thousand lives and a thousand deaths,_   
_and I will never break my promise. You and I,_   
_we are two souls that were created together,_   
_two souls that keep a part of the other inside us._   
_No matter the pain we have to go through,_   
_my love for you is as eternal as the sky above you._

_With undying love, I promise you I will find you_   
_again and one day we will not be ripped apart._   
_One day, eternity will be ours and I will be here_   
_with you when this day finally comes._

Sam flipped through the rest of the book, despite knowing it would be empty. When he reached the last page he stared at it for a few minutes, almost angry that there were no pictures of him and Lucifer in there anymore. Of course he knew there wouldn’t be, after all, this life was not one where they had been happy, but he still felt betrayed when all he was met with were empty pages. The anger didn’t last long though. It quickly changed into grief and sadness over the happiness that they had not been granted this time and that he was unable to remember all those time that they had been happy.

The worst thing, however, was that Lucifer had known, and this thought shattered Sam’s heart. he clutched the book and pressed it against his chest, now finally allowing the tears to fall - and they did. Lucifer had remembered every single one of their lives together - every kiss, every smile, every touch - and he had died knowing that this time none of these wonderful things had happened. And it was all Sam’s fault, he knew that. Lucifer had tried his best and all Sam had done was push him away.

He wished he had never found this book in the first place. If he had never found it, he would have never known how much he had thrown away by clinging onto morals that he never agreed with. If only he had allowed himself to listen to his heart, rather than his head. They could have been so good together. They could have been happy and maybe, just maybe, this time could have been the time they found their eternity together. Now it was all destroyed and no matter how much Sam cried - and he felt like he would cry for the rest of his life - there was nothing he could do to change what had happened.


End file.
